


to dance with death, to beat the ground

by concertine



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Greece & Rome, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Reincarnation, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Unreliable Narrator, liberties were taken and sleep was lost, this is what they meant when they said my classical education would pay off someday, totally self-indulgent pontificating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 17:37:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16769758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/concertine/pseuds/concertine
Summary: “I thought gods didn’t have soulmates,” Yuuri whispers. His face is so very close to Viktor’s.“I thought so too.” Soulmarks and soulmates were meant for mortal folk—what use did the undying have for souls?-[life, death, love, and loss: told through the fragmented lens of the deathless gods.]





	to dance with death, to beat the ground

**life i.**

The first time Viktor Nikiforov meets Yuuri Katsuki, he is still young for a god.

The harvest rites stir up the mountain path around him, sparks from the torches drifting up with the wind. Everywhere Viktor looks he sees bodies dipping and swaying to the hypnotic beat of the drums, fire and wine weaving dizzying patterns through the darkness. Fawn skins flash across his vision, pinecones waved overhead and crushed underfoot. Viktor staggers along to the crowd, to the lights, to the voices as they carry him up the steep path. It feels good to be human, just for a night.

In a clearing, he dances until somebody collides with him, nearly pushing him into the fires.

“I’m sorry,” a voice shouts, and Viktor steadies himself as he looks down to see the source of the voice: an apologetically laughing mouth.

“It’s okay,” he says, and when the owner of the mouth makes a confused face, he leans in to say it again into their ear. This seems like a fantastically good idea at the time, except Viktor overbalances and falls into the other person. He is righted again, and once upright he notices that the mouth is attached to an exceptionally handsome young man, whose hands as they hold Viktor’s elbows are sticky with spilled wine.

The young man laughs again. “I’m Yuuri,” he says. “Come and dance!”

Yuuri is a very good dancer, better than Viktor is, and Viktor has danced on Olympus to the melodies of the Muses. He drags him into ecstasy when the pipes begin to sound, and they dance in circles around each other until Viktor is breathless and limp with wonder. He feels like he’s transcended. Yuuri’s dark hair is damp with sweat that gathers in the hollow of his collarbone, at the base of his neck. His head flicks back in time with the trance, and Viktor wants to put his mouth at the vulnerable skin left exposed by the chiton and lick the salt off Yuuri’s skin. 

“I’m Viktor,” he offers instead.

“Your voice,” pants Yuuri, his own speech loose and rough from exertion that Viktor does not feel. “Your voice sounds like winter.”

It’s Viktor’s turn to laugh now, to snap his head back to the pulsing pound of the reverberating drums.

“Not tonight!” His voice carries. Yuuri is right: It sounds like the scraping of metal on ice and the howl of the frosted north wind. It sounds like the voice of a god, and Viktor is displeased. “Tonight I am trying to be mortal. Drunk and all, as you can see.”

He bends Yuuri’s back down into a low, low arch with a hand on his shoulder blades. The worshippers around them are screaming for rebirth.

Yuuri’s eyes are wide; his hands are very still on Viktor’s skin.

“A god,” he breathes, and jerks back into a bow, eyes fixed on the ground. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend—" 

Viktor reaches out, meaning to help him up, to say _no, it’s all right, I’m not that important anyway, all I rule is the north wind, please, let’s dance some more, please, it’s euphoric_ , but then he catches sight of his outstretched arms. 

There are deep red splashes on his elbows where Yuuri had first touched him. It looks as if someone had crushed berries into ink through the sieve of his skin, pressed the colour deep into the veins, like a birthmark or a bruise. 

No. No, this was neither a birthmark nor a bruise. Gods were born perfect, and they stayed perfect. Viktor had seen this type of marking before, in lovers huddled together for warmth as he blew past, in old couples stoking the fire behind the walls of their home, in the storm-ridden tragedies of old. He had seen them less and less as the world aged, but they were burned into the consciousness of mortals, and the memories of the deathless gods.

This was a soulmark.

“Stand up,” says Viktor, but he doesn’t get much farther than that because the other man’s eyes lift, and Viktor sees in them the moon and the fires and his own shock reflected.

“Is that—” Yuuri stops. He shakes his head once, and then again.

“Yuuri.” Viktor hates the plaintive harshness of his voice and the way it makes Yuuri frown, tries his best to soften it. “Can I touch you?”

Wordlessly, Yuuri holds out his left arm, palm up, the alabaster skin unmarked and pale. Equally wordless, Viktor presses two fingers to the inside of Yuuri’s wrist, as gently as he can, and both watch as the same red blooms outwards from the touch in spirals.

Marking him.

“I thought gods didn’t have soulmates,” Yuuri whispers. His face is so very close to Viktor’s.

“I thought so too.” Soulmarks and soulmates were meant for mortal folk—what use did the undying have for souls?

“I don’t know,” Yuuri whispers again, suddenly sounding panicked. “I don’t know. Are you a god or not? How can a god be my soulmate? I don’t _know_.”

Viktor is rarely emotional, but he cannot help the sudden surge inside him, a rising that says, _mine_ , that says _mine only_.

“It’s never happened before,” he notes, trying to keep calm. “But, well, obviously it’s happening now.”

Yuuri is trembling a little. “Which god are you?” he asks. Viktor removes his hand from Yuuri’s wrist before he replies, trying to comfort him, but Yuuri makes a convulsive movement and grips Viktor’s fingers tight between his.

“Don’t go,” he pleads, still in the same small voice. “I—who are you? Don’t go.”

Slowly, Viktor returns the hold. Yuuri’s skin is still sticky beneath his touch.

“I am the god of the north wind,” he answers. “I come from Thrace, and I am the bringer of winter.”

“The north wind,” repeats Yuuri, a growing terror in his tone, and Viktor is not nearly drunk enough for this.

“I’m not leaving,” he tells Yuuri, his voice gentle in a way he didn’t even know it could be. “I won’t leave you,” and slowly, slowly, Yuuri’s hand loosens its grip. There are gods who abandon their human lovers and humans who fear divinity for it, but Viktor is not so cruel. He has a conscience yet.

“We should go somewhere else,” suggests Viktor. He feels a bit like he’s talking to a spooked animal, like Yuuri needs him and is afraid of him at the same time. He wants to tell Yuuri that he won’t hurt him, that he would never, but he swallows his tongue. God or no god, he would be mad to harm his soulmate.

Yuuri nods once, then twice. “O-okay,” he agrees. “Okay.”

Viktor summons the wind. The torches around them gut out as he sweeps them away.

* * *

They end up in a copse of trees just outside the Sacred Way, about halfway to Athens. The wilderness is cool and strange around them, but Viktor is not afraid. He himself is a cool, strange thing, and so he knows intimately the others of his kind. 

They sit for a while, just sitting and talking and working off the wine, and Viktor probes delicately for details about his soulmate. Yuuri is skittish at first, trust tempered by an awe that Viktor dislikes, but he still opens up. He still shares, he still gives.

“My family runs an inn in Athens,” Yuuri tells him. “We’re not the richest, but we’re decently well-off.” He is of the Katsuki clan; he has an older sister and a dog. Viktor loves dogs, and Yuuri lights up when he hears.

“You should come see Vicchan!” The words burst from Yuuri’s mouth. Before he can think to take them back, Viktor leans forward and _beams_. He has always been told that he has a heart-shaped smile, and he puts it to good use here.

“I’d love to,” he says sincerely, and sees a mirroring smile grow on Yuuri’s face.

It is easier after that. Viktor makes Yuuri laugh with his stories of the fellow gods: _I don’t know why Yakov stays underground all day, if he actually saw the sun once in a while he’d be less grumpy,_ and _I know Otabek’s supposed to be a nice spring breeze, but I work with him all the time and I’ve never seen him so much as a crack a smile_ , and _Don’t be fooled by Yura’s “young newsboy” image, he’s crabbier than the rest of us combined_. It helps Viktor remember that he had been charming, once upon a time when the world was younger and sweeter and fresher, and that he had enjoyed it.

He enjoys being charming for Yuuri. Yuuri, in turn, charms him effortlessly. There is a certain something to how he pushes his inky hair out of his eyes, the expressions that burst onto his face full force, and the shy way he glances at Viktor, devastatingly demure, that strings itself right into whatever excuse Viktor’s got for a heart. His soulmarks heat.

In the darkness, by the light of the moon, Yuuri’s eyelashes shine silver, the curve of his lips worthy of a hundred love songs. He catches Viktor looking at them, and holds his gaze.

Yuuri’s kiss is sweet, his pulse fluttering and fragile where Viktor’s hand presses to the soulmark on his wrist.

And oh, Viktor is so lost. It has been so long since he last felt such warmth.

Yuuri’s lashes flutter when they pull apart. He cuts an indistinct figure in the dark, edges buffeted by shadows. The cool night air settles lovingly, tenderly over his silhouette.

Viktor doesn’t know what to say. So he says:

“I would love to have a dog.”

“You can come see Vicchan,” says Yuuri immediately. “We can share him,” and though Viktor has been given gifts of gold and jewels, though kings in every land have made sacrifices in his name, he is still struck to the core by this unthinking generosity.

Yuuri rambles on, oblivious. “He’s really fluffy, and small, and he fits in your lap perfectly, and he’s got curly fur and the biggest brown eyes…”

“He sounds perfect. All dogs are perfect.”

Yuuri’s eyes light up. “ _I know_!”

* * *

Viktor discovers things by being with Yuuri Katsuki. He discovers that he loves softness when he meets the Katsuki family and they look at him with no fear in their eyes, only affection for Yuuri’s soulmate. There is softness in Hiroko’s cooking, nearly as delicious as the finest ambrosia, softness in Vicchan’s curls and his greeting bark, softness in the way Yuuri winds his fingers through Viktor’s long hair as Viktor presses him against the wall of a dark alley in Athens, their kiss a honey-sweet rasp. He discovers that he is more rebellious than he originally thought, when winter arrives and he shirks his duties for three whole days just to grab Yuuri around the waist and take him beyond the north, beyond even Viktor’s own home, beyond any imagination of mortals.

“Vitya,” Yuuri says when they reach a band of jagged, unnamed mountains, snow glistening on the peaks below them, “where are you taking me? You promised me a surprise, not snow and ice.”

The ends of Viktor’s hair catch around his mouth; he shakes them off and laughs like a falcon’s screech. “Wait and see, we’re almost there!”

And then they are past the mountains, a black ring at their backs, and Yuuri’s breath catches.

“ _Vitya_.”

The wind thrashes around them like a living thing, but Yuuri is safe and warm in his arms. They are cocooned in the eye of a hurricane. Viktor wants to freeze the moment, preserve it like a snowflake, eternal and discrete and perfect: Yuuri next to him, breathless with wonder, the ground shrunken and discarded as they hover in the air, wilderness behind, paradise in front.

 _Remember this,_ he thinks fiercely, suddenly. _Remember us. We will hang here forever in the annals of time._

“Vitya,” his love breathes again. “This is—this is—”

Viktor _beams_. “Welcome to utopia, darling. You are the first mortal to lay eyes on Hyperborea.”

A thing to know about Hyperborea: The sun never sets.

Another thing to know about Hyperborea: It is a perfect country.

The Muses are dancing when they land.

* * *

Winter passes, then spring, then summer, and suddenly it is nearly fall again and Viktor is lying on a chalk-white beach in Crete, thoroughly exhausted. They had spent the morning chasing each other into the waves, kicking up puffs of sand and splashes of aquamarine water with each step. Yuuri had left footprints; Viktor had not. 

“Do you think we should go to the harvest festival again, Yuuri?” Viktor idly examines the red patches on his skin. Even after a year, looking at them still gives him a thrill.

Yuuri falls onto the sand next to him with a huff. “Sure,” he says.

Viktor frowns despite himself. “You don’t sound very enthusiastic. Would you rather go somewhere else, maybe? Thebes is nice this time of year, or maybe Sparta…” he trails off at the look on Yuuri’s face, pensive and solemn.

“It’s been a year, Viktor,” he says. and the lack of diminutive more than anything makes Viktor sit up, spine straight.

“Yes,” says Viktor slowly. “It has. Is that a problem?”

“I don’t—” Yuuri’s fingers trace small, nervous circles in the sand. “I’m a year older, Vitya,” he finishes softly.

Viktor blinks. “I didn’t forget your birthday, did I?” He doesn’t think so, but time is fluid to a god. Before Yuuri, Viktor would blur out for months at a time, just blowing around the world from place to place, little more than a breath, a cycle.

Yuuri had made him whole, had made him _present_. Gods, but Viktor loves him. He’s an ass if he has forgotten Yuuri’s birthday.

“N-no,” says Yuuri. “Not really.”

Viktor sags in relief. “Oh, phew. I was thinking I had somehow, and that I’d gone and done it and I’d have to pull off a miracle to fix—”

“I don’t want a miracle,” says Yuuri abruptly, voice hard. “I’m sick of miracles.”

A beat of silence.

“I don’t understand,” says Viktor. He is puzzled, but the truth of what Yuuri has been getting at is buzzing at the corners of his mind like a fly he has chosen to ignore instead of swat head-on.

“You’re a god, Vitya,” says Yuuri bitterly. His hands fist in the fine sand. “And I’m not.”

“We were fated to be together,” Viktor blurts. The truth dances on his tongue. “I love—”

“But I’m going to _die_!” Yuuri shouts, and then starts to cry. All Viktor can do is sit by helplessly, not knowing what to do. There is no crying among the gods, especially not in the barren stronghold of the north, where the tears would freeze as they fell.

There is nothing frozen in Viktor now. Yuuri is the sun and the sky and the stars, he is flaming sparks at night and the gentle lap of the ocean. He is Viktor’s whole world, the twin of his soul, and he burns too bright to be a dying thing.

If Viktor could, he would separate Yuuri’s soul from the sack of bones trapping it to the earth and give it a form of gold, of light, of air. He would make him unbearable, he would make him adored. He would swallow Yuuri’s soul and let it spill back out divine from his blood, from the bloody marks at his elbows.

Why are beautiful things so temporary? Why is the body temporary?

“I don’t want to die,” Yuuri sobs. “I want to stay with you and—and ride the wind and eat honey cakes and play the lyre and pick wildflowers and throw snowballs and dance. You’re my _soulmate_ , Vitya, _please_.”

“You won’t die,” Viktor says, suddenly desperate. He is grasping, falling. “You can’t. I won’t let them take you. I will go to Erebus, and I will freeze hell until they give you back.”

* * *

Yakov had raised Viktor once, deep within the bowels of the earth, before winds had thought to blow over the surface. It is always cold, in Yakov’s realm, with his bejewelled gardens and skeleton courtiers. Yakov is a gruff man, who had been kind to a young Viktor in flashes made all the warmer for their rarity. But as a god he is fair, and terrible for his fairness, and renowned for it. 

Mayhaps Viktor had forgotten Yakov the god, so caught up as he had been in Yakov the man. He certainly remembers it now.

On her throne besides Yakov, encrusted with rubies patterned to resemble pomegranates, Lilia shakes her head. As a child, Viktor used to watch that head, and the neck on which it rests, waiting for it to shake under the weight of her crown, under the weight of all the earth on top of her. He had never seen it waver, and it does not waver now.

Not even when the creature who was once like a son to her kneels at her feet and begs for a life.

“This is the rule,” thunders Yakov, implacable and inexorable. “This is the law. The boy must die.”

Viktor grits his teeth from where he kneels in his suppliant’s position, one hand on Yakov’s knees, the other under his chin. The old deity’s rough beard is coarse to the touch, his jaw firm and hard and unyielding. This is the most entreating pose he can think to make, the humblest level to which he can lower himself, god to greater god. It is not a request, but a plea. A cry for help. A powerless bid for mercy.

“Will you not make an exception? Just this once?”

The god of death shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Vitenka. His life cannot be given; the Fates will not yield. I will promise him Elysium, if that will ease his passing.” He meets Viktor’s stare with iron-clad eyes, dark with meaning. “For as many times as necessary.”

As many times as necessary?

(Yakov, his large hands on Viktor’s shoulders amidst the shadowy asphodel, his eyes locked on his: _think, Vitya. Think, Vitya, think._ )

It comes to him in a bolt of clarity.

“It is not a solution, you understand,” reminds Yakov. “Merely a means of delaying the inevitable.”

It is not enough, and yet it has to be.

“Thank you,” says Viktor. He bows until his forehead touches the floor, his hair shining bright as polished bone against the throne room floor.

“And, Vitya…” Yakov’s gaze strays to Lilia. There is pity and grief in it when it returns to Viktor. “Be careful.”

* * *

Yuuri is silent when Viktor tells him. The surf laps at their ankles from where they stand side-by-side on the beach, foam frothing. The Cretan night is dark and still save for the repetitive monotony of the waves, clear enough to see the stars arching overhead. Viktor thinks that maybe he should put something of Yuuri up there in the stars as well, for the world to see. His lovely hands, maybe, or the way his hair tangles and falls into his eyes, or the bones of his ankles. The way he dances, the texture of his spine through his skin, the bright sharp alive taste of him on Viktor’s tongue.

He feels loose, long-limbed, animal. Yuuri, by contrast, is as steady as gravity.

“If you do not want this,” Viktor says, “it is alright.”

“Vitya,” says Yuuri, “I have known you for a year. In just this one year, you have taken me all over the world, to places only gods have been, and your love—your love has made me half believe myself a god as well.” He opens one closed hand, then fists it again. Even that gesture is gentle when it comes from Yuuri.

“But you are not,” Viktor admits. It is a bitter piece of evidence to hold in his mouth and speak into existence.

Yuuri looks at him then, over his shoulder, and half smiles fondly. “How many years do we have left, my love? How much more will you show me in those years? How much longer would you have me pretend my existence isn’t terminal?”

“You haven’t seen the whole world yet,” says Viktor, and it is a promise.

Yuuri sighs, and leans on Viktor’s shoulder as the wind picks up. The cold salt water splashes more roughly at them now, but he does not waver. His hands find the soulmarks on Viktor’s elbows as he turns to face him more fully, and Viktor shivers with it.

The wind snaps their clothing out, kicking sand onto their skin, but Viktor is separate from it. Yuuri’s touch grounds him as always.

“I want more with you, Vitya,” says Yuuri quietly. “Four lives are four times more than most folk get with their soulmates, and I am greedy. I want them all.”

Viktor does not say what he wants. Both of them know what it is, and both know that it is impossible.

“Yakov has promised Elysium for you, every time. I made him swear it on the Styx.”

Yuuri closes his eyes and leans harder into him. “Thank you.”

“That is the only way this will work,” Viktor cautions. “Four lives, and three reborn from Elysium.”

“And after the fourth?” asks Yuuri.

“The isles of the blest.”

Yuuri smiles, eyes still closed. “Are the isles of the blest more beautiful than Hyperborea?”

Viktor’s throat closes up. If he cries, he reasons, the tears will join the salt spray on his face, and no one will be any the wiser.

“I will do it,” says Yuuri, with such conviction that Viktor startles. His eyes open, lit with a determined fire. “I want it, and it wouldn’t be fair to you otherwise. Having to live all alone."

“I was alone before you. I can learn to be so again.”

Yuuri shakes his head. His hands tighten on Viktor’s elbows. “I love you, Viktor. I will choose rebirth after every death, and come back to you for three more lives, until all are exhausted. I swear it on my mother and my father and my sister. I swear it on the dust in Athens I was born from, and the unknown dust on which I will die. I swear it on you. I swear it on me.”

“Yuuri,” says Viktor softly. “You do not have to.” It is not that there is enough love in Yuuri’s eyes to break his heart. It is that Viktor’s heart is already broken, and he fears the rest of him will fracture as well. He ought to build a temple to contain this sacrifice. He ought to level a city to demonstrate its power.

A storm builds overhead. Tomorrow, the entire beach will be washed away as the sea surges swollen with it.

“I want to,” whispers Yuuri. And then: “I swear it on the Styx.”

It is done, then. There is no turning back.

* * *

The rest of that life Viktor cannot remember, except that it was all love, love, love, and it is probably true what they say, that the firsts are the most important ones. There are small flashes, yes: dancing with Yuuri in a field of golden grain, navigating Yuri’s poorly-hidden jealousy at their relationship, bare skin at night, a dog named Makkachin. It is sweet, and all too short. 

In the end, Yuuri goes quietly, the first time.

The winter that year is the worst in centuries.

* * *

**life ii.**

They meet again in spring.

Spring in Rome is an ebullient thing, the city waking from the long spell of winter. Everywhere Viktor looks, he sees blossoms bursting defiantly through cracks and shuddering forth from branches. The same scene, every year, and by now Viktor is used to the feel of his power waning in response as he blows from the northeast across the Tiber.

 _Death,_ thinks Viktor. _Death and rebirth, in a cyclic ring_. Was that not how they had met, him and his Yuuri? At the harvest, at the mysteries, dancing in time to drums that thudded like a heartbeat? The risk of death, and the promise of renewal?

Oh, but that had been lifetimes ago, and the world is so, so changed.

Viktor doesn’t know it yet, but this is the golden age of Rome. They are erecting Trajan’s Column in the new forum being built—the largest forum, and the last. The emperor has returned to Rome, where he will stay for the next seven years. All is well.

It is perhaps the best possible age for the second birth of Yuuri Katsuki.

This time, all Viktor feels is numb.

This Yuuri is older, broader, more serious, very different from the lithe, sticky-handed youth he remembers. He is leaning against the stone of the _Pons Aemilius_ and looking out over the water, a gratifyingly recognizable pensiveness in the set of his brows. There is a narrow stripe on the exposed right shoulder of his tunic, and though Viktor has never bothered to remember the hierarchy of the new world order, he knows enough to understand that Yuuri is a high-ranking citizen.

Yuuri cannot see him, though judging by the way he rubs his hands together and grimaces at the sudden chill in the air, he senses Viktor’s presence. His toga, lit in curving shadows by the noonday sun, is exceptionally white and meticulously draped over his left arm in elaborate pleats befitting a patrician. The wrist beneath is empty and pale.

Viktor is suddenly dizzy. Of course, of course the mark would be gone. Viktor has not touched Yuuri in this life. His problem is that this is not his Yuuri. The one in his memories was Greek, with hair that fell into his eyes instead of being pushed back over his forehead, with a soulmark that burned like a fire at night. Viktor used to like to kiss that soulmark. He wants so badly to be able to kiss it again.

But then Yuuri smiles, and it’s a painful thing, because the smile is still the same, the way it spreads to take over and transform his entire face. Yuuri used to smile at him like that, with delight mapped across his features and shyness tucked in the corners of his mouth. It is Yuuri’s smile, and yet it isn’t. Because this time, he is smiling at someone else.

The youth that hugs Yuuri has black hair like him, but darker skin and a bold, bright face. His right hand is hooked into the back of Yuuri’s toga, knuckles a brilliant orange.

“Phichit!” Yuuri exclaims, laughing as he pulls away, and Viktor finally notices what’s been there all along: The back of Yuuri’s neck is stained bright yellow as a spill of sunlight.

His own elbows bleed dark, dark red. 

Viktor turns and flees.

* * *

He runs southeast, across the wine-dark ripples of the Ionian Sea into warmer, drier lands. The water chafes in his wake, salt-bleached cliffs buffeted as he hurtles past them into Greece. 

This Greece is also different, a province of the Empire that has lost its former might. Viktor’s first inclination is to head straight to Athens, but the face of that city is changed as well. It is no longer the Athens of him and his Yuuri, but the Athens of Rome. There is no Katsuki family plot left, and a different pantheon reigns. For a brief, mad moment, Viktor wonders if this is not just another life, but another world.

In the end he goes to Thebes. Chris had left Athens with the slow decline of his beloved theatre, instead preferring the quieter plains of his seven-gated home. Thebes, too, is not what it used to be.

“Ah, yes, the good old days,” Chris reminisces, lounging on the leopard-skinned monstrosity of a couch in his peristyle. Chris had opened up his best wine for Viktor. Chris is a good friend.

“I killed my cousin on one of those hills, you know,” says Chris, pointing out at the woods of Cithaeron. From this distance, Viktor can’t make out which mountain slope exactly he means, but he doesn’t think it matters to Chris. “At least I didn’t do it directly. Or, well, I sort of did. Sometimes I even regret it. He wasn’t so bad, you know, when all is said and done, and he made a pretty good king of Thebes.”

Christophe Giacometti is a gentle, terrible sort of god, kind and mad in equal measure, but the people, for the most part, love his melodramatic, hedonistic ways.

“I don’t know,” Viktor attempts to disagree, because he supports and validates his friends. “He was pretty bad.”

Chris sighs suddenly. “Yes, and he was—he was so _small_ , Viktor. So absolutely inconsequential in the long scheme of things, no matter how much he hated me and tried to drive my worship out of my own city. Do you think about that? The entire life of a mortal is just a little flicker of light. Unless, of course,” he amends, “they’re your soulmate.”

“You’ve got a point,” Viktor agrees, trying to redirect the topic because he doesn’t know where Chris is going with this, and he really doesn’t need to hear him wax rhapsodic again about his wild childhood. Viktor is older. He had been there; he had seen it happen. A teenage Christophe is not the kind of horror Viktor wants to remember.

“Alexander the Great _was_ quick about it,” says Viktor. “A blink of the eye.” He doesn’t know what he’s saying, but Chris nods fervently.

“Exactly!” Chris nearly spills the wine from his _skyphos_ as he gesticulates. “Rome is a toddler. I know you’re older than I am, Vitya, but have you ever _imagined_? The scope of things! In another millennium everything will be different again, and we—well, you’ll still be here, we’ll always have a north wind. I might end up gathering dust, just like my theatre.”

“I hope not,” drawls Viktor, voice dry. “It would be a tragedy if everybody stopped throwing parties.”

“But what’s the point of a revel if no one thinks about me? If no one dedicates or sacrifices to me? Look at my theatre, already faded and neglected, and nothing I can do about it besides. What I’m saying is that maybe we rely on mortals more than we think we do. Who knows where we’d all be if they just decided to stop believing one day? Olympus would just be a mountain. Wine would just be wine. Even war…but I suppose if no one worships JJ anymore, that would be a blessing.”

“Chris,” Viktor says severely. “Are you drunk?”

He has the good grace to look ashamed. “Maybe just a little bit.”

“Chris,” says Viktor again. “This is _my_ pity party, and furthermore as the god of wine it is completely unbecoming for you to be this drunk.”

“On the contrary, I’d say it’s more like my occupation. My divine duty, if you will.” Chris stretches languidly. “I’m always like this this time of year. It’s just the spring. My rebirth. All the festivals held in my honour. We should,” he declares emphatically, “be nicer to mortals.”

“I met Yuuri at one of your harvest festivals, you know.”

“I do know. It was ages and ages and ages ago.” Chris sees the look on Viktor’s face and claps a hand over his own. “I’m sorry, Viktor. I’m really sorry. I don’t know—look, you know he has to die, right? He has to.”

Viktor sees in his mind’s eye Yuuri, pressed up against his chest in the soft black night, both of them lying awake. It had been Yuri who had led Yuuri down to the Styx. He can still hear little Yura saying _Come back soon_ , and envision the gentle sadness on Yuuri’s face as he promises he will.

He had wondered, then, if four lives were too much to ask, even of a soulmate. Four selfish, selfish lives and deaths, four heartbreaks, four goodbyes.

Chris presses on. “And the soulmark he has now is platonic, it’s of two different colours. This doesn’t stop you being with him.”

“I know,” says Viktor. “I know. But what if it’s better for him if I say nothing?”

Chris’s eyes watch him over the silver rim of his drink. He is a younger god than Viktor, and works younger powers. He has not yet seen his fill of the world’s lost hopes, still brimming with the blind naïveté of his own dark liquid. Chris is young enough to believe in happy endings.

Viktor is old enough to think that happy endings don’t exist.

“He’d die,” Chris reminds quietly. “Forever.”

“But he could go to Elysium. Yakov would let him stay there without coming back, if only for my sake. Eternal paradise. He wouldn’t have to keep being reborn, and meeting me, and suffering for it. All I have to do is keep my mouth shut.” Viktor can see it for a split second: Yuuri in Elysium, shining with all the peace and contentment not afforded to him in life.

“I don’t think that’s a choice you can make for him.”

Why does Chris always have to be so right?

“It isn’t,” Viktor admits. It had been one of Yakov’s teachings, long ago when the north wind had first crossed the adamantine gates of hell. On power, and the abuse of it.

“‘We only have jurisdiction over such decisions as we make for ourselves,’” he quotes softly.

Chris tilts his cup until liquid flows over the edge in a broad stream, turning first to tears, then to molten gold, then finally a vine that snakes around the legs of his couch.

“Go find him, Viktor,” he counsels, and it’s no different from what Viktor expected from his old friend. Good advice, rejecting instead of enabling Viktor’s excuses for cowardice. “Apologize if you have to. But go find him, and let him choose for himself.”

* * *

Yuuri’s skin melts into red when Viktor’s touches him for the second first time. 

“Viktor,” he breathes, and Viktor presses his thumbs into the new soulmark with fervent desperation.

“Do you remember?” he urges. “Do you remember me?”

Elusive recognition dances in Yuuri’s face. Then:

“ _Vitya_ ,” he says, and Viktor could cry, he is so relieved. He has spent countless nights dreaming of this half-remembered warmth, in the barren wastelands of the north.

Yuuri throws himself into Viktor’s arms, wrinkling both their clothing, and then Viktor really is crying because this is his soulmate, his Yuuri, and he has missed him so _much_.

* * *

“You don’t have to,” Viktor tells Yuuri, because he must say it. “If you feel you don’t want to come back anymore.” 

Yuuri stares up at him.

“Why wouldn’t I want to come back, Viktor?” He looks away, and then adds, nearly inaudibly, “Elysium was lonely without you anyway.”

Viktor grasps Yuuri’s hand impulsively and kisses his palm, where the new soulmark is.

“I was lonely without you too.”

In this life, they buy the rings. Viktor watches chariot races by Yuuri’s side (he always makes bets; Yuuri doesn’t), and the entirety of the Senate is absolutely stunned when young _eques_ Yuuri Katsuki calls on the North Wind to bless him in the middle of a speech and Viktor swoops obligingly down, freezing the senators’ togas to their seats.

In this life, they do all the things Yuuri wants, and they do them slowly. Last time it had been Viktor snatching at the opportunity, revelling in the newness, but they come into their second lifetime together with decades of love already built in and decades more to savour it. They go to Egypt to see the lighthouse of Alexandria and the great pyramids, and Yuuri laughs wildly at how much the camels despise Viktor. They go to Syracuse in Sicily to see Arethusa’s spring, and when they meet Yuri again the young messenger is too happy to even pretend at grumpiness.

In Delphi, under towering Parnassus, Yuuri clasps Viktor’s elbows and swears the old oath anew.

Viktor does not remember how Yuuri goes this time. There is a gap in his mind that jumps from Yuuri, hair as silver as Viktor’s own, coughing in bed to Viktor all alone, standing in front of a marble grave at the edge of the city. He makes a point of never trying to fill that void.

In this life, Yuuri is respected, beloved, renowned. He is a scholar, a speaker, a teacher. He is kind to senators and slaves alike, and loyal to the empire. He is a model citizen.

That winter, all Rome mourns.

The north goes dark, dark, dark for many centuries on end. The gods flicker and fade.

* * *

**life iii.**

“You were right, Chris,” Viktor says softly, though there is no one to hear him in the long empty street. “You’re gone, but I’m still around.”

He has been attending every party he can get his hands on, trying to catch glimpses of Chris in the wine-frenzied delirium of mortal men. It is rare that he finds anything—the madness of drink is not godly anymore, it is not divine. It’s as ugly and brutal as anything Viktor has ever seen, and he knows it is not Chris. Chris may be primordial, he may be wild, he may even be cruel. But there is nothing of him in those festering black pits of rot.

The Empire is decaying, Viktor thinks. The current emperor has expanded it, but soon it will decay again, it and its new god both. It has already been halved; it cannot be much longer before it is halved again. Constantinople is a strange city, an odd city, at once an impregnable fortress and a rioting pot about to boil over. The chariot races here are perhaps more violent than they ever were in the Rome of old, and there are no longer temples. Nobody has openly worshipped Viktor’s pantheon for over a century, and he withers with it. Even though winters here are colder than they were in balmy Rome, he feels his power wane with each season, blowing to the continent over the Sea of Marmara. The summer heat presses down on his head like a suffocating blanket.

He longs for his beloved Greece of old. There is an emptiness in his heart that is too big for the absence of Chris alone: There is little Yura missing, and old Yakov and hawkish Lilia, the interwoven Crispino twins, Seung-gil with his boat over black waters, and—

—Viktor is distracted by some seagulls swooping on the horizon.

(His elbows itch to the point of pain, but when he inspects them, he sees no rash.)

There is a brackish taste in his mouth when he turns back to the road.

Must he always be the north wind? Must he keep blowing winter over the world until the world’s end? The sun shines, but it is not Michele Crispino driving the chariot—there is no chariot at all, in this strange new world. The wars rage on, but Viktor no longer sees Jean-Jacques on the battlefield, shouting his gleeful encouragements, trailed by attendants.

 _It’s too bad_ , he thinks bitterly. They had destroyed the old gods to promote a new civilization with none of the savage antiquity of ages past, but everything is so much more primordial than Viktor has ever known it to be. There is nothing human to explain away the wild darkness of the forest; there are no beautiful naiads to lure you into the water. Drowning is just drowning. There are no goddess’s fingers in the thin, magicless dawns.

Viktor had gone to Olympus last season, flying past a warm breeze that might have been Otabek if he’d squinted. Beka had not been the same since Yuri had gone—none of them have, really, and now they are practically the only ones left. Viktor doesn’t know why he’s still around, when even the stubborn west wind is yielding to the onward march of time. He feels transparent, insubstantial, loosely woven silk ready to blow apart at the first disturbance.

And yet, he hangs on. There are so many missing parts of him, but he hangs on. Already he is nothing more than the breaths of strangers, the fragments of memory, the impulse of the seasons. One moment his identity is clear, and the next he is all but gone.

 _I am the god of the north wind, and I love_ —

Who does he love? Everyone he loves has left him, and Constantinople smells like incense and tension and crushed pine needles.

(There is something not quite right about this image. There is something not

quite

right—)

A dark-haired young man turns the street corner. Viktor’s vision resets itself, swallows itself.

The young man stops, frowns. Looks right at where Viktor stands frozen in place in the street.

There is a cross hanging around his neck.

There is a cross hanging around his neck, but he can see Viktor. No one has looked properly at Viktor for over a hundred years, but there are dark eyes on his, and a furrowed brow, and he can’t tell if the rush in his ears is his own ichor or the beats of the seagulls’ wings.

 _Oh._ Oh. _Should I_ know _you_?

The shadows in the street loom large, stretching into grotesque contortions of the objects they describe. Viktor takes one step, and then another. Is it possible for a god to be so dizzy? Is he even still a god?

“Good evening,” he manages. His voice grates; there is a flicker of fear in those eyes.

“Good evening,” says the young man warily, but not unkindly. “Are you quite well? You seem faint.” When Viktor stumbles, he steadies him, hands sliding down Viktor’s arms and the touch is like a scalding burn.

( _this is wrong this is so so wrong_ )

Viktor grips the other’s hands back on reflex, thanks stumbling from his mouth, but his supporter suddenly leaps back with a shocked, choked cry.

Viktor’s first thought is maybe he is bleeding. Maybe he has somehow become human, and cut himself, and that is why there are twin splashes of red from elbows to wrist on his alabaster skin, as if he had just butchered an animal while wearing gloves.

He checks himself. He is not bleeding, and he still feels immortal.

His eyes meet the horrified stare of the young man, who has one hand stark against his cross. He is clutching the dark wood so tightly that bone shows through the skin of his knuckles, but neither of his hands are coloured.

“I am Yuuri Katsuki,” he says in a trembling voice, and Viktor feels the _wrongness_ of it like a punch in the gut. “Names have power. What do you want from me, foreign spirit? What is your name?”

 _My Yuuri would never speak like this_ , Viktor thinks reflexively, a flash of instinct bypassing the brain, but the thought is gone as soon as formed.

“I am Viktor Nikiforov.” He does not mention the god part. The word he is about to use is old, old language, an ancient part of the world that is not named now, and that is bad enough without implying he belongs to the long-defunct ‘pagan religion’. He points at his own arms instead. For once, something feels right.

“I do believe that these are soulmarks.”

He doesn’t know what kind of response he is expecting, but it is not this:

Yuuri Katsuki backs up three steps, then turns and runs.

Viktor sits down, hard, in the street.

* * *

Memories come back slowly, filtering through the cloudiness one bit at a time. Many reappear when he returns to Thrace—there are old gods there, still bubbling in the murk of his homeland—but it isn’t until he makes it to Athens that they come back fully. 

The Parthenon is shut down, the Acropolis where it stands a husk of its former self, but it’s easy, still, to remember the grandeur it used to have. Even stripped of its gold, Mila’s statue still stands proud and imposing, a massive centrepiece demanding worship. Viktor had not seen Mila in some fifty-odd years, but it is nice to see that here, at least, she still stands tall.

Sitting at the base of the statue with his eyes closed, Viktor can almost taste the Athens he knew, the one he shared with Yuuri. It was olives and honey and wildflowers and wine, each passing moment a soap bubble of fragile, insubstantial, iridescent joy. He could almost hear the Muses’ songs sound again, him and Yuri and Mila and Chris sitting together on Olympus, watching the smoke from the sacrifices rise towards them from the world below.

Stubborn, small Yura, full of cut-glass edges and bravado. He is so close Viktor can almost hear him, always restless, always hungry.

There is an exasperated sigh right beside his left ear. Viktor’s eyes snap open so quickly he nearly pulls a muscle.

“You think more loudly than this whole city put together,” says the boy who used to be the god of messengers.

He must be hallucinating, thinks Viktor.

“I must be hallucinating,” he says aloud.

Yuri Plisetsky crosses his arms and cocks an eyebrow. “Viktor, you can’t even remember Katsuki’s birthday right now, are you sure you have the mental capacity to be delusional?”

“I— _Yuri_ ,” gasps Viktor. His voice sounds desperate. He _is_ desperate. “It’s really you. You’re back.”

“Yeah, well, don’t be too impressed. I’m only able to exist clearly when I’m near Mila’s statue. The hallmark of Greek civilization, and all that.” The set of Yuri’s mouth grows grimmer. “It’s not easy to manifest like this, in my old form. This might be the last time I’m able to speak to you directly.”

“Have you been here all this time?” Viktor asks, astonished.

“Once I tried to leave to see how Beka was doing, but I couldn’t find him and as soon as I got as far as Piraeus I had to turn back.” Yuri’s voice is more cynical than Viktor had ever heard it. “The gods are fading, Viktor. Most of us are gone already.”

“What about Mila?” demands Viktor. “Yakov? Lilia? Chris? Are they here too?”

Yuri waves a hand. “Here, there, everywhere. Now,” he says, his gaze sharpening with a palpable effort, “tell me what’s going on. Because as far as I can tell, you’re the last god of any importance that’s left.”

Viktor takes a breath. “I can’t remember Yuuri. I don’t—I don’t know when it happened, but I lost the soulmarks.” He tugs a hand through his silver hair, shining dully in the dim light of the abandoned temple, and fixes his eyes on the dust motes overhead. “I didn’t recognize him, Yura. The soulmark is unreciprocated. Nothing happened when I touched him, but I was still marked when _he_ touched _me_.”

Yuri’s eyes are round and horrified when Viktor looks back into them.

“Viktor,” he breathes. “You’re fading too? This quickly?”

And Viktor hates to admit it, but he is. He knows that now, here in Athens with Mila’s image at his back and Yuri’s wavering presence before him.

“To lose one’s soulmate requires a loss of an extreme magnitude of identity,” he acknowledges quietly. “Yuuri was bonded into my skin, and I don’t even remember when that stopped. I didn’t even feel anything when it did.” He can feel tears pricking at his eyes. Maybe if he had held on, maybe if he had not forsaken Yuuri first, the bond would be reciprocated now.

Yuri cuffs him on the back of the head, but the blow is so insubstantial, it doesn’t even stir the air around it.

“Snap out of it! This was always going to happen, so shut up and let’s start thinking of a way to do something about it!”

Viktor stares. “What do you mean, this was always going to happen? Did you know this would be the outcome?”

Yuri scoffs. “Old man,” he says, “don’t kid yourself. Don’t you remember what happened the last time a god was soulmates with a mortal?”

Yes, Viktor remembered. He remembered a great deal more things now. “Achilles was not a god,” says Viktor.

“He was close,” Yuri insists. “He could have been.”

“He _died_ , Yura. We watched it happen from the walls of Troy. Achilles lost his godhead the moment Patroclus died, and he sealed his own death when he killed Hector.”

“He was half god. Like Chris.” Yuri’s mouth is set stubbornly, the wings on his wand fluttering restlessly. Yuri had thought Achilles a lion, a prince, a warrior. Viktor knew better. Achilles son of Peleus may have been the best of the Greeks, but he had been a hard, harsh man, vainglorious and arrogant, with little consideration for true honour, or for the privilege his power afforded him. He had had the cruelty of a god but the narrow confines of a finite life, accompanied by sick mortal ambition: an unquenchable thirst for fame.

Viktor can still recall well the shock wave that had reverberated through the gods when Hector killed Patroclus and stripped his armour before the walls of Troy. In response, Achilles had ruined Hector and wrecked a river out of wrath, a selfish curdling of rage and revenge. What were Helen’s beauty and Troy’s riches and the hunger of the whole Greek army compared to his own, singular, desperately human grief?

Viktor knows the costs of immortality better than anyone. Achilles could never have been a god. What little godhead he had possessed as a human had ruined him.

“If it had been a Greek who had killed Patroclus, Achilles would have burnt down every ship,” Viktor says quietly. “The immortal half of him died with Patroclus, and the mortal with Hector.” It had been Yuri, in fact, who had protected Priam when the old king went to the enemy camp to beg Achilles for the return of his son’s mutilated body. The hero then, the one Yuri had seen weeping in his tent, had been no hero at all.

Yuri’s face twists, and Viktor knows he is envisioning the same scene. “What about you then? Is half of you dead?”

Viktor laughs. It is small, and impossibly bitter. “Unfortunately, Yura, I am all god, and no love will change that.”

“So what? Are you just going to give up? Let him go?” Yuri’s voice rises like a child’s before a tantrum, riled by the defeat in Viktor’s. “You won’t even put up a fight?”

“What else can I do?” Viktor snaps. He is abruptly angry, and the temperature drops to show it. “There’s nothing than can be done.”

“You’re his _soulmate_!”

Viktor remembers Yuuri, standing on the beach, wind whipping and tearing at his clothes and hair. Yuuri, hands clasped over the soulmarks on Viktor’s elbows as the sand stung their eyes, swearing that in every death, he would choose rebirth, and that in every birth, he would choose Viktor. Life after life after life, until all four were over and done.

Yuri Plisetsky would love nothing more than to see Troy made right again. Viktor is aware of this—he wants to see Achilles deified and Patroclus living, Cassandra protected and Hector honoured beyond all thoughts of men. He is willing to claw for every inch of happiness he can get, and Viktor has no right to blame him for it.

But Viktor has nothing left but pride, and he cannot—will not—play to his whims.

“I am. But the problem is, he is not mine. Not in this life.”

If this is all that is given to him, he will live with it, as he must. He will watch over Yuuri from the shadows where he cannot scare him, and when the cold north wind blows into Constantinople each winter, it will not touch the Katsuki house. That little bit of warmth, Viktor can still give him.

Yuri is furious for three more seconds, and then he deflates slowly, like a limp balloon.

“I can’t fight with you, Viktor. I don’t have the energy.” Yuri’s shoulders slump; he is nearly translucent now, even in the low light, and it is easy to see how slight he is. He has never been anything more than a child, tricky and clever and fierce, fighting tooth and nail to have a place in the world.

“Maybe next time, some of the others will be around,” says Yuri. “So come back soon, okay? Or I’ll find Beka and get him to kick your ass.”

Viktor wishes, abruptly, that Yuri was not confined to youth. He wants to see Yuri Plisetsky as a man, without this carefully concealed desperation in his words. This Yura is dying, that is plain to see. He is only a child, and yet he is dying. Viktor swallows hard.

“Okay, Yurochka,” he promises. “I’ll be back soon.”

When Viktor exits the Parthenon, squinting in the sunlight, the first thing he sees is the rim of the Acropolis peering over the city. Even this high up, the steep outcrop is the only clear line in the afternoon haze.

He takes it at a run, throwing himself over the edge, and lets the wind whip away his tears on the way down.

* * *

What is a god, in the end?

Tears and blood and worship and sacrifice, smoke on their altars and statues in a temple.

Gods require believers.

What is a god whose own soulmate flees from them? Who thinks them a demon?

Immortality will fade without mortals to sustain it, and you cannot smite anyone who does not subscribe to your power.

Achilles could be selfish because he was immense, he was mighty, he was dynamic and destructive as flame. But it ruined him, in the end, the chaos of loss.

Know this: love is not divine. God though you may be, love will impale you. It will trap you and light a match.

(Once upon a time, Viktor Nikiforov would have levelled continents to see Yuuri Katsuki smile.)

Immortals cannot be reborn.

But they can be redeemed, through love.

If they burn long enough. If they burn loud enough.

* * *

**life iv.**

It is seven in the morning, and in the distance, a clock tower is proud to declare it.

Lyon is misty and pink in the dawn, the chilly haze of early December blanketing its paths. It is cold enough for Viktor to buy a hot espresso from his favourite café while he reads the morning paper, perched on a bench in the middle of frosty grass. The city is still beginning to wake, drowsy and impotent, candles from the ongoing light festival still stubbornly sparking in some of the windows.

There is not much interesting in the paper; Viktor flips absentmindedly between headlines about renovating the _Opéra Nouvel_ and comics whose punchlines he never seems to understand. In about fifteen minutes he will cross the Rhône to his favourite _bouchon_ when it opens and buy a tart for breakfast. Christophe will rag on Viktor at work, in that Swiss accent of his, to make his food himself, and Viktor will smile and shrug and say, as he always does, “ _Je m’en vois pour faire la cuisine_.”

When Viktor arrives at the _Musée des beaux-arts_ , he will meet the artist they’re scheduled to feature just before Christmas. It is rare that they ever feature someone living, especially if the artist is not French, but this one has been making global waves. As assistant curator, it is Viktor’s job to make sure the museum keeps up with the times, and he has been studying up on Japanese aestheticism to prepare for this meeting.

He is not sure why he is so anxious for this. Perhaps because it’s an important business and publicity opportunity, or perhaps because the photos he has of the artist are all so exceptionally handsome.

Viktor finishes his espresso, and wonders idly if Yuuri Katsuki likes dogs.

**Author's Note:**

> a few notes on the classical background below:
> 
> viktor here is based on boreas, the god of the north (often referenced as northeast) wind, in roman times referred to as aquilo. boreas's home in antiquity was indeed thrace, as is given by many authors. in general when dealing with contrasting sources i have tried to go with the voice of the majority, or else i subscribe to the authority of homer and usually prefer greek sources over roman. 
> 
> the land of the hyperboreans, or hyperborea, is a real mythological place although no one has ever placed it exactly besides saying it's way up north past some (made-up) mountains. the isles of the blest and the four rebirths are also a mythological thing - if you achieve elysium three times successfully, on your fourth life you will go to the isles of the blest, which are basically paradise on steroids. the harvest rites here where yuuri and victor first meet are loosely based on the greek dionysian mysteries, which you will probably be more familiar with in their roman incarnation as the bacchanale, along with the eleusinian mysteries that did indeed take place in eleusis, near athens. 
> 
> the suppliant's pose is a real thing, and the era of rome where yuuri lives his second life is given as late into the reign of trajan, who is probably my favourite roman emperor and overall a good and valid dude. christophe is obviously based off of dionysus/bacchus, whose origin was placed in thebes and who did have a big theatre in athens. dionysus did, in fact, kill his cousin pentheus, king of thebes. it wasn't pretty; you can google it if you want. 
> 
> the lighthouse in alexandria, arethusa's spring in sicily, and the role of yuri (aka hermes/mercury) in guiding spirits down to the underworld are all true. yuuri's roman social ranking is one of the equites - basically he was very well-off and of high class. constantinople, or the third life, is dated sometime around/during the reign of justinian I. the oppression of pagan religion may have been slightly exaggerated. there were definitely people secretly worshipping the old gods, as well as periods of more relaxed legislation and religious freedom; christians were also persecuted by the romans in the early days of christianity.
> 
> mila's statue is the famous athena parthenos (now lost) in the parthenon in athens. the interpretation of achilles is entirely my own reading, but i do have strong feelings about him being really a pretty big jerk. the river of styx is one of the five rivers of the underworld, and it is the river on which the gods swear their unbreakable oaths.
> 
> finally, lyon, which was once the capital of the roman province gallia lugdunensis, is dated in 1993, as evidenced by the paper viktor reads which speaks of the renovation of the opéra nouvel, which took place in 1993. the french here is accurate to lyonnais french, and the museum is real and very pretty. the story's title comes from lord tennyson's in memoriam, which is a gorgeous masterpiece and one of my favourite poems.
> 
> thank you for reading! please feel free to leave kudos/comment if you would like, and i hope you enjoyed this long messy ride of a fic :^)


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